Adventures in Sparkles and Ruffles

Friday, March 1, 2019

When the collections begin to make their way down the runways and into the presentation spaces of New York City, the work of discerning the dominant trends of the season starts immediately. Some of what we see is no surprise. Floral prints return every spring and summer without fail. Often enough they pop up for fall and winter as well. The silhouettes of the 1980s have hung around the periphery or been at the center of the ready-to-wear landscape for nearly a decade now, and at this point one could argue that their continued presence might be a sign of industry-wide creative malaise. But where a good amount of the fun, and fashion is supposed to be fun after all, rests is the unveiling of the unexpected trends. There is a thrill in experiencing the risks that land and those that do not. It is in this arena where many of the questions of the season arise.

Will we once again go a full year unable to find a tee, blouse, or sweater with covered shoulders? It appears for now that we will be spared a return to such indignity.

The colors are the most changeable aspect of the collections. Blues for a particular resort season might swing to yellows for the spring that follows. Reds in New York can easily transform into that timeless classic of black by the time festivities wrap up in Paris. Mood and season and moment all combine with something intangible to create The Color.

What was The Color during the Fall/Winter 2019 season in New York? Actually there were many colors, more than one might expect to see on offer for the colder months, and they were of a deeply saturated sort. But pulling focus from all the others was a pink that one could give any number of names. Brilliant. Electric. Eye-watering. An aggressive pink. A pink from which one can't look away.

There has been a fair amount of pink in the cultural and design conversation for the past few years. Millennial Pink so dominated the discourse around the color that people began labeling pinks that in no way resembled the hue as such. It's a common enough reaction to trends, the chasing of a moment in the pursuit of relevance. The pink of the pussy hat, a complicated and sometimes controversial symbol created in response to our current political moment, rose to prominence just as its millennial sibling began to fade into the background. However, the pussy hat was never really one pink. It was many. It was the pink of whatever yarn you could find hiding around the house. It was the pink of whichever skein struck your fancy in the craft store. There was, in that regard at least, little uniformity in the project.

How pink came to be associated with the feminine in western culture is a topic worthy of a historical tome. I could never do it justice here. But when discussing the trends that come and go each season, what's most important is that in this moment, from the palest, whisper shade to the deepest magenta, pink has been assigned to a side. There is nothing wrong with being aligned with the feminine. (It feels silly that I have to make this statement but here we are.) The issues come from the ways in which so much of our larger culture views women and anything associated with them. There is a presumed softness, not only when it comes to the physical but also when it comes to the mental. A lack of an iron will. An airheaded frivolity. Like all colors, pink is many things. Often it is more than one of those things simultaneously. But like the women with whom it is associated, it is rarely given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to depth.

What about the mood, the season, and the moment led us to this particular shade? It was certainly not crowned The Color, either this year or last year or the year before that, by Pantone. Almost exactly one year ago in one of those odes to the 1980s that seem inevitable now, there were neons everywhere in New York. They encompassed almost the entire rainbow. Twelve months later, most of the others have fallen away. The blues flirted with indigo. The greens shifted to hunter. The yellows were burnt and the purples were rich. Yet the pink remained hot to the eye and, one might imagine, to the touch.

The packaging and selling of political ideas is not new nor, in my opinion, particularly interesting. For me it often grates and leads to the release of a frustrated huff. So the commercialization of Feminism (capital F required) generally, and White Feminism more specifically, comes as no surprise. That particular strain was occurring before November of 2016, but it has become more prominent in the aftermath of that election. If you let your mind slip for a moment, it can almost feel as if those items are making a real point about where one stands. Then one remembers that payment is required to announce said stand in that manner. This phenomenon exists at all price levels but the sour, sweet stink of the affair hangs most heavily in the air at the top. $700 for a tee is ridiculous no matter how one looks at it. $700 for a tee proclaiming your belief in gender equality is beyond the pale.

A color, well a color is both more complex and more subtle than a glib turn of phrase. One could wear this hot, searing pink merely because one likes pink. Because it looks good on you. Because you have become bored of a life fulled with neutrals. Similarly the designers' inspiration could have roots in any number of places. So while I believe that this shocking pink's appearance is partly tied to what is happening in the wider world, I don't believe that the same sour taste rises from its use. To take something coded as feminine and flip the tedious connotations on their heads, to make it brilliant, electric, eye-watering, and aggressive feels like a different kind of project.

There can be shame and fear in being looked at, especially as a woman when more often than we like those looks are directed and perverted by men. But when one controls the direction and strength of the gaze those feelings can fade away or settle quietly into the background and in their place can rise a power. Here you are unrepentant in the announcement of your femininity. Not a revolutionary act necessarily but a standing proud and firm.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

By its nature, reinvention is a tricky
undertaking. What should one hold on to? What should one discard? And
when one finally reaches the bare bones of the thing in what way and in
which direction should one begin to rebuild? This concept and these
questions often confront us as a year draws to a close.

Calvin
Klein will need more than a handful of resolutions to pull itself out
of the quagmire in which it currently sits. The brand, barely into a
major rebuilding project, now finds itself rudderless. Only two years
after arriving, Raf Simons made his exit. There will be no collection
shown at New York Fashion Week next month, and while there have been a few steps made to roll back Simons' changes, there is no
real understanding of what will happen next.

In the
decade since the global economic upheaval caused by the Great
Recession, the fashion industry has dealt with a fair share of turmoil.
Current day disasters aside, the economy as a whole has recovered. And
yet uncertainty touches every corner of the industry. There is a
skittishness that didn't exist prior to 2008. Many major brands find it
hard to hold onto a creative director. Lanvin has had four in as many years following the falling out between Alber Elbaz and the brand's owners. Carven has found itself in a similar situation since Guillaume Henry departed for Nina Ricci in 2014. There are too many of these
stories happening at too fast a rate for a full accounting of each one
to emerge.

But the breaking of Simons and Klein feels bigger.

The
timing of the announcement was the first sign that this rupture was
different from the many others we've seen in the past decade. In a
previous age, the holiday news dump was often left to celebrity divorce
announcements. In this age, the dumping is continuous and the news being
dumped is of a more cataclysmic sort. When this news dropped on the
Friday before Christmas, there was something of the old about the entire
affair. In a way it felt comforting. But then one remembered why these
dumps happen. They occur to hide and distract. The dumper hopes that
when people return from family dinners and presents and skiing or
sunning that they will have moved on. That they won't feel the need to
dig beneath the surface of the announcement.

When Simon’s appointment was announced in August of 2016, there was a
frisson of excitement. His eponymous menswear line has a cult-like following. His years at Jil Sander were almost universally
lauded. His short tenure at Christian Dior in the wake of the brand’s John Galliano disaster was more divisive, but he still had the respect
and admiration of many in the industry. At Calvin Klein he was to be
Chief Creative Officer in charge of every piece of the brand from the
stark white underwear to the denim to the runway. It was the kind of
power that now only comes when one is working under one’s own
name. (And sometimes, depending on whom you've sold off stakes of your
company to, not even then.) It was obvious that this meant a change, a
real change, at Calvin Klein. You don’t choose to give a darling of the
industry all of that power otherwise.

The total
overhaul has become de rigeur this decade. Hedi Slimane landed at Yves
Saint Laurent after the somewhat unceremonious sacking of Stefano Pilati
and instantly discarded the “Yves.” Three
creative directors, the aforementioned Elbaz, Tom Ford, and Pilati had
controlled the reins after the man himself stepped aside, and while each
had presented his own particular vision for the house of Saint Laurent
none had touched the name. For some, Slimane had gone too far before he
had even begun. There were rules. There was respect to be paid and
history to be honored. You could strip a brand back to its bones but to
pull out the foundation was unimaginable.

But it
worked. Monetarily at least. It worked and worked and worked until one of those inevitable breaking aparts that now plague the industry happened. Three years seems
to be the longest any one brand can hold onto any one person. Three
years seems to be the longest any one person can bear to stay in place.

Bringing
something back from the dead, or the nearly dead, is a different beast.
Christopher Bailey lifting the Burberry plaid out of the gutter it fell
into after an indiscriminate distribution of licenses is one thing.
Marc Jacobs launching ready-to-wear at Louis Vuitton is another. Shaking
things up is expected. A major recalibration is what's needed. There
have been other examples of this kind of work in recent years, the rebirth of Schiaparelli for example, but that is not what was occurring at Yves Saint Laurent or
the now defunct
Calvin Klein of Simons. This is not what is occurring at Riccardo Tisci's Burberry. There was no dormant period. There was
history. Recent history. Uninterrupted history stretching back decades
in some cases. There was occasionally economic stagnation as well, but
does that call for a complete dismantling?

It feels
important to note that in the three cases mentioned above the people in charge were or are
men. It’s a small sample size and in no way statistically
significant, but when one looks at the work of the women in similarly
lofty positions, one can’t help but begin to draw some conclusions about
the why of matters. Maria Grazia Chiuri, who joined Christian Dior after
Simons’ departure, Claire Waight Keller, who began to helm Givenchy
after they and Tisci parted ways, and Laura Kim, who, along with her
co-creative director Fernando Garcia, oversees things at Oscar de la
Renta, are mining the histories of their houses.

Oscar de la Renta often posts a #tbt video
from one of the house’s past runway shows
on social media
and then goes on to explain
the ways in which the featured themes have been referenced in the
present day. From the start, one could see the silhouettes of Hubert de
Givenchy's mid-20th century work throughout the clothing presented by
Waight Keller. While it's not as apparent in the ready-to-wear
collection, the haute couture at Christian Dior always has with it a
sense of the house's history. Each of these women is presenting her own vision but one can
see the through line. They honor the past without feeling stale. They move things forward thoughtfully and with purpose.

“We started by offering just items that the house didn’t have before
like suiting, denim or evening tops, and softer goods like chiffon
dresses,” Mr. Garcia said. “And we’ve been doing it little by little so
we don’t alienate the very loyal customer that the brand has.”

One
could retort that what works for one might not work for another. Maybe
what one brand needs is a reappraisal of its storied past. Maybe what
another needs is to forget all that came before.

Or maybe what some of these men feel the need to do is stamp their influence on something
so boldly that no one will ever forget that it was they who were the
creators. Even when the umbrella under which they are creating does not
bear their names.

What it
means to be an American generally, and an American brand specifically,
is wide-reaching and often in flux. But even within that expanse, one
cannot deny the fact that Calvin Klein as a brand is an icon in that
regard. What was discarded in the building up of CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC,
as Simons renamed it, was that stabilizing center. The runway looks
produced by him included references to Americana, movies and collegiate culture and Warhol, but it all felt removed and overly cerebral. Not
that the Klein of old was dumbed down. Not that at all. Its brand of
Americanness was an uncomplicated, classic, sexy sort. It was about line
and silhouette and less about imagery.

I
quote James Baldwin often in scenarios where one might not normally
reach for him. But when it comes to words written about the American
condition and the American mind, its beauty and its underbelly and its
beating heart, there are few who are better.

America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White
Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied those more
civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the
presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans
have supposed "Europe" and "civilization" to be synonyms—which they are
not—and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of
vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have
attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe
was also east for them.

Ready-to-wear
is, and has been for decades, a global business. Three of the past four
designers at Givenchy, a French house, have been British. The
outlier, Tisci, is Italian. The previous designer of Calvin Klein,
Francisco Costa, was Brazilian. Carrying on the legacy of a brand does
not require that one have lived one's entire life among the culture with
which
it shares a history. But there is something about the white American
obsession with the Old World as mentioned here by Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, with its
assumed ingenuity and beauty, that can lead to the
washing away of a core essence with roots in a different place. While
Ralph Lauren sent him models down the runway to the sounds of the
Downton Abbey theme for Fall/Winter 2012 and Dapper Dan has been heartily embraced by the type of brand that once sued him, the former's lush preppiness and the
latter's irreverent look at luxury are both American down to their
marrows.

Was
the assumed superiority of European luxury what was running through the minds of the
executives at Calvin Klein's parent company? Probably not consciously.
They were most likely hoping to emulate the monetary success of
Slimane's
Saint Laurent and Alessandro Michele's Gucci by scooping up an available
European prodigy of their very own. And as has now become the custom, they discarded him
and anything that he had created when it didn't immediately
work in their favor.

I
wanted desperately to like the Calvin Klein of Simons. When he
presented his final collection for Jil Sander, I thought here is a
talent. For awhile I was able to twist my thoughts in such a way that I
liked, or even loved, those CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC runway collections.
But I couldn't forget the Calvin Klein that had been, and oddly enough
it was Simons himself who wouldn't allow me to let that image go. During
his short tenure, he launched Calvin Klein by Appointment, a
made-to-measure offshoot that was most often seen on celebrities at
majorevents. Many of those looks instantly transported me to the
house's cleaner, simpler past.

That could have
been enough if I had let it be. But the dresses seen on magazine covers
and the looks that littered ad campaigns and came down the runway were
something else altogether and reminded that this Calvin Klein was not
that Calvin Klein and maybe it wasn't Calvin Klein at all. Not really.

Monday, December 3, 2018

I tweeted that to someone in the aftermath of the latter's first collection for Céline. Perhaps it was a tad unkind. A bit much. But I was upset. The dread I felt at the initial news of his appointment was so deep that I wiped it from my mind for a time. "I don't like this," I told a friend months after that announcement. She gently reminded me that I had already yelled about this particular subject to her. So I lived it twice, that rage and disappointment, before settling into a resigned posture. But as the fashion elite moved from New York to London to Milan and finally Paris in the early fall, my anxiety returned.

Sitting there at my desk watching the models stomp down the runway in a collection that was not at all new for Slimane, I considered laughing. From the first look with its short length and its oversized bow, it was obvious that we were being served Saint Laurent 2.0.

Can one successfully perform the same trick twice? I don't know although it was apparent on that morning that the decision makers at LVMH and Céline were betting heavily on the possibility. What I did know was that I could be unimpressed twice. When Slimane took over for Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, I didn't have many expectations. I had heard of Slimane here and there in the fashion press before the news of his appointment was announced, but his tenure at Dior Homme ended before I began to turn my attention to menswear. I knew a couple of the buzzwords that circled his work. Skinny. Rocker. To my eye, there was a bit of sameness to all of it but then what did I know? Not much honestly about the business of menswear. And after many nervous seasons of chatter about Pilati's possible ousting, I knew that I would be fairly bitter about whoever replaced him no matter the style direction they chose to take the brand in.

After Céline 's Spring/Summer 2019 show ended, I dug through my tweets in search of my thoughts about his first Saint Laurent collection. I assumed that I had been mildly pissed but mostly indifferent. I was wrong.

So I kind of hate the Saint Laurent Paris (formerly #YSL) show. Fine, not kind of. More like with every ounce of my being. #pfw

Rage stings and it stains and this particular one apparently never left me.

I've never owned any Céline from the Philo era. I've never owned any Céline period. I've never more than touched it, fingertips brushing against a line of dresses on a rack as I walked the sales floor of various luxury department stores like the Barneys that sat in the mall where I spent the back half of my 20s treading water at a retail job. I was there often enough that one of the stylists in the women's ready-to-wear department would warmly greet me before leaving me to my worshipful reverie. These clothes and bags and shoes, so far outside of the reality of my life both then and now, are mostly a thought experiment for me. I look at runway and red carpet pictures and make sometimes delightful, sometimes insightful, sometimes snide assessments. I daydream often. About soft leather pencil skirts and cognac loafers and dresses of various (literal) stripes. In my life, the high fashion world lives in a liminal space between reality and mirage.

In spite of this distance, there are designers who create clothing with which I forge a personal connection. Or maybe that connection springs from said distance. I look but only barely touch and so a bit of the myth surrounding them remains intact. I can revere them because I am not aware of the flaws that live up close. Because of this distance I know that a not insignificant number of my biases are, at times, baseless. When I am being mature and reasonable and a bit cold, I stomp those biases dead as they begin to bloom. When I am none of those things, when I am rash and passionate, I can't help but let them grow.The tip top of this industry is lacking in women at the fore, but it wasn't only Philo's womanhood that drew me to her designs first at Chloé and then at Céline. There are men who I love unabashedly and with few reservations. Dries Van Noten. Alber Elbaz (formerly of Lanvin). Billy Reid. Scott Sternberg (formerly of Band of Outsiders and currently of Entireworld) to name a few. And much like Slimane, a number of them started in menswear before moving into womenswear.

When the reservations do arise, they often come from the same place as my distaste for Slimane. A frustration when it becomes clear that these men have forgotten that they are designing for women and a woman's body. When it's obvious that just for a moment we became an abstract concept to them. Women are many things and our bodies are as varied as the stars that hang in the night sky so one might think this task wouldn't be all that difficult. Pick a woman, any woman, understand her to be a living, breathing, thinking thing and then continue from there. But that path trips up more people than you might imagine.

Just a normal Friday night of excitedly yelling about Phoebe Philo with a friend.

A friend and I were sitting on a familiar bar patio talking close that night. When I discuss fashion with people, the conversations are often mundane. This is lovely. That is horrifying. We remain on the surface level because I fear that a push deeper might begin to bore my partner. If not stopped, I can begin to spiral into arcane facts and sweeping pronouncements. I begin to talk about legacies born and history made. About the highly intellectual and the more earthbound emotions. The pieces that make me shriek or clap or shiver in anticipation. But there are times when I don't stop myself and become a different person. A talkative person. An easy person. None of that hard exterior that isn't really hard.

I wasn't expecting the shrieks or the claps or the shivers to appear as I watched the first Slimane for Céline show. I knew it wouldn't be like the morning I stood with my laptop sitting on my mother's ironing board becoming increasingly enthralled by an otherworldly Alexander McQueen show. I knew I wouldn't be consumed by a deep sadness and a deeper appreciation like I was when watching the closing, rainbow light show of Christopher Bailey's final collection for Burberry. I had come to appreciate, like, and even covet some of his work at Saint Laurent. His brief return to couture right before his departure comes to mind. In those proportions and with that craftsmanship, I became enamored with his vision for a moment. But only a moment.

I wanted something different here. Something new. Not necessarily for me and my body but something beyond that limited, stilted concept of a woman. Because I loved Philo's Céline. Because I loved the woman she was making clothes for. Because I had given my heart to the brand. A silly, juvenile move but, as is often the way with such things, it occurred without my knowledge. And when you give your heart to something or someone, you hope for a gift in return.

I wonder what she'll do next and what he'll do next. I hope for a Céline collection in this new era that stirs that joy and that lust, but I'm not sure if I'll ever find it with him.

Friday, September 14, 2018

There are motifs that never disappear
from fashion. They appear no matter the decade or the dominant color
story of the season. They show up again and again despite the industry's
thirst for the new. So we get used to them. We get bored of them. We
scoff and talk about a lack of freshness and an abundance of
predictability. I am not immune to this behavior. I wish that I were,
but it is easy when one is fifty collections deep in a particular season
to fall back on the glib and the snide because those are the simplest
words to reach for through the fog of your mental exhaustion.

It
rained throughout the winter before last in Los Angeles. I dusted off
my Chelsea-style rain boots and stomped through the rivers that ran down
our poorly draining streets. At times, the rain shifted from heavy,
steady drops to gray sheets of unpleasantness. The late spring of 2009
in my hometown of Boston had been a wet, dreary affair but winter rain
is different. Winter rain here in this land generally full of sunshine
is especially different. I finally understood why longtime residents and
those for whom this part of California has always been home complain
about rain so much. Little of the variety that I grew up with back east
exists here. Warm spring rains. Humidity-busting summer downpours. Sun
showers that compel you to tilt your face skyward, eyes closed as drops
plop gently on your cheeks. Despite the monotony of that Los Angeles
winter rain, I knew something joyful would greet me at the end of it
all. Something I had not seen in my then three years in this city.
Something that would finally arrive after years of a drought that
predated my arrival.

The spring that followed dropped
heavily upon the city. The hills and mountains were a deep green. Trees
bowed their heads under the weight of fragrant flowers. Cacti I had
never seen bloom suddenly sprouted petals in a deep coral hue. A friend
lamented that she had moved back east just in time to miss Los Angeles'
first true spring in years. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter were full
of people trekking inland to see the Super bloom. I had not been behind
the wheel of a car in over a decade, so I took joy in what I could like
the views from the patio of the hilltop house where I rent a room and
the vistas that blurred in my windows on long bus rides.

Fertility.
Birth. Rebirth. By their nature, flowers are wrapped up in all of these
signposts of spring. And for reasons that need no explanation, these
signposts are often associated with the complex concept that is The
Feminine. From there they get jumbled up with tangential ideas. Purity.
Beauty. Romantic love. It is through these lenses that we
often view floral prints. There are designers who can take these classic
threads and create pieces that are inspiring and eye-catching, pieces
that feel light and sweet but never shallow. In the past few years, I've
found myself enamored with Luisa Beccaria. I look through her
collections and imagine a world in which I would feel the urge to put
dresses like those on my body. I wonder if some of the heaviness that
burdens my mind and my soul would float off as if repelled by the
goodness of the garments.

It takes a fine hand to play
with that sweetness. One can easily swing into the saccharine or the
cliché. Vogue puts a young, white, blonde actress who has recently passed into adulthood on its cover wearing a blooming headpiece and you
shake your head at the lack of subtlety. Bothersome questions for which
you already have the answers make your skin itch. Who is allowed the
space to be "sweet"? Who is seen as "innocent" without any qualifiers?
The next year Vogue wreaths the heads of two black women in flowers and
you chide yourself for forgetting all that flowers can mean. But the
questions remain because you know that part of the reason they meant
more here was that they would never be used in that simplistic matter
for these women or the girls who share their skin. An unfair assessment
of the people in charge of crafting many of the images seen in this
industry? Perhaps. Although a piece of you knows deep down that you're
right.

As I've gotten older, I have become less and
less of a fan of symbolic anvils or sledgehammers. Purity placed on a
pedestal and discussions that flatten a woman's sexuality turn me off. A
few years ago there was a collection with dresses that made the models
appear to be emerging from a grouping of petals. "These girls are in
bloom and ready to be plucked," they screamed. I rolled my eyes in
response.

When the Spring/Summer 2018 collections began
to walk down runways and stand languidly in presentation spaces last
September, the floral prints were inescapable. This wasn't their usual
return. This was overwhelming. This was intoxicating. This was Los
Angeles in spring after a winter of hard rains. I was going to write
about them then. I started to write about them then. But as with most of
my recent projects not commissioned by someone else, I left a
half-finished draft to rot in a neglected Word document.

I
didn't expect an early screening of Crazy Rich Asians to be what
brought me back here to these year-old paragraphs and half-finished
thoughts, but on that mid-August evening there was our heroine,
Rachel Chu, greeting the family of her boyfriend in a
procession of flowers. Correction, the greeting had already happened and
the flowers were nowhere to be seen dressed as she was first in a red
cocktail dress favored by her mother and then in disco-tinged Missoni
stripes borrowed from her friend. The flowers showed up in the back half
of the movie when the conflicts that had been simmering beneath the
surface came to the fore. They started quietly enough, a yellow flower
against a deep blue backdrop that reminded me of a printed dress I'd
worn in the fall of 7th grade. They culminated in a cloud of tulle in shades of sweet blue. "Why that color?" someone asked as I took to
Twitter to discuss the movie after its release.

Cinderella obviously.

Flowers
for fighting. Flowers for standing one's ground. Flowers for asserting
one's worth. Not dainty or fragile. Anything but weak.

Two
days ago I read back through my tweets about Spring/Summer 2018 to
remind myself why I was compelled to start all of this a year ago. It
couldn't have just been the abundance. Goodness knows I'll likely never
feel the need to sit with a glass of rosé and scribble on and on in my
notebook about the recent return of the peplum or the baffling
resurgence of the bucket hat without the hope of a paycheck at the end
of my trials. Once I was again among those clothes, it was instantly
clear why these prints had grabbed me. It was that depth and that
breadth. They had kept me from doing what would have been so easy,
falling back on the glib and the snide because those would have been the
simplest words to reach for through the fog of my mental exhaustion.

Flowers are for congratulation, celebration, and mourning. They can hide dark secrets and deep shames. They can mark the passage of time. So in no particular order, here is a small taste of what was offered a year ago.

The
fashion calendar is oddly timed and needs revising, but I've always loved the bittersweet feelings stirred up by looking at all of these
sundresses and bathing suits and shorts as summer takes its last
breathes. Of
course I watch from afar now. But Los Angeles has been a bit moody recently,
beset with a morning chill that sometimes takes until the late afternoon
to lift, and so the bittersweet returned.

New York Fashion Week has ended now and everyone
has moved on to London. Yellow was everywhere. Despite my distaste for
them, bucket hats stuck around. The sheers menace that has haunted
formalwear for nearly a decade seems to be going nowhere. The flowers
were there as they always are but not in the same sweeping manner as the
year prior. Maybe things will change in London, Milan, and Paris but I
doubt it. This new set of collections will likely resemble the spring we
most recently had in Los Angeles, beautiful yet muted in comparison to
the one before.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Sometimes things burrow beneath my skin and I can't shake the ill feelings that they cause. Slights and grudges and misspoken words take up space I'd prefer not to give them. I wish it weren't the case, especially at those times when the discussion is, if I think about it for a moment, far removed from me and this life that I'm living. But some feelings can't be helped because I know that the words igniting them are tied to bigger, nastier ideas.

At 3:20 AM on Saturday, May 19th, I sat in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite with a small group of friends as we waited for things to begin. I had arrived only three hours earlier after a number of travel woes. Too exhausted to sleep, I snatched a 90-minute nap before the day's festivities. And so while running on fumes with a navy and white fascinator on my head, a lounging jumpsuit and fancy robe on my body, and my laptop set on the coffee table in front of me with Twitter open, I settled in to experience a wedding I'd been waiting months to watch.

For my own well-being, I have steered clear of most of the wildly racist commentary that has been, well, everywhere since the world became aware of the relationship between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. But there was always going to be talk that found its way around my carefully constructed walls. The smaller, insidious comments have a way of sneaking in, and I shouldn't have been surprised that these painful pricks arrived via an area of my life that I leave the least protected.

Fashion Twitter, of which I consider myself a marginal member, is full of nitpickers. Where else can one find people yelling excitedly about someone flouting the theme at the annual Met Gala? Generally I find this social media corner a comfort. Here are other people who care not only about clothes but also about what people are trying to say with their clothes. It was no surprise then that when Meghan and Harry was confirmed, and especially after her Vanity Fair cover and subsequent appearance by his side at the Invictus Games in Toronto, the fashion media sat up and took notice. Women in such positions have the ability to make or break brands. Sometimes the making can lead to the breaking. This wasn't only about pretty clothes. It was also about business and symbolism. To ignore her choices at that point would have been foolish.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (née Markle) is biracial and not in the business of allowing anyone to forget that she is half-black. I have no official data on this front but it wouldn't be wild to assume that there have never been that many black people in St. George's Chapel at one time. Despite my body feeling broken on that still dark Saturday morning, my mind was delightfully awake and looking forward to the black gospel choir, the black bishop, and the black cellist who were to be part of the ceremony. As we watched the guests arrive, I was full of joy and thoughts of romance. And then, all of a sudden, I was full of red-hot rage.

I didn't see anything messy about it but then, outside of the sculptural coifs I remember seeing in pictures from the hair shows my older sister took part of in the 1990s, I have grown a personal distaste for hairdos that are stiff and shellacked. To my eyes, her hair looked relaxed and protective, a simple fix for anyone who has to worry about the havoc humidity will wreak on naturally curly hair that has been straightened.

A spot of emotional rot began to bloom within me, and as I realized that the conversation after her first official event with that hair had moved beyond basic descriptor to whether or not said "messy bun" was appropriate my uneasiness only grew. "Why not call it a loose chignon?" a friend asked recently. It was a good question coming from a rational place. But then she was not part of the demographic I was concerned with. Most, although not all, of the criticism was coming from the mouths of white women. A tweet saying that the updo wasn't "royal hair" floated across my timeline soon after that Cardiff event, and I was left wondering what exactly constituted "royal hair." I already knew the answer. My ears are attuned to dog whistles about black people, especially those concerning black women and girls.

I have lived 35 years with my hair. I have had strangers and acquaintances and "friends" make comments that no one asked for or feel free to touch it without permission. I have watched news segments and read stories about children sent home from school because their similar hair styled in any number of ways was seen as untamed. Unkempt. Inappropriate. I knew I wasn't upset at nothing.

There is something that happens to some white women, an ugliness that rises from their chests, when a black woman is successful. The success can be big or small. It can be in any arena. All that matters is the fact that she is existing and thriving. The darkness is only amplified when the success occurs in the public eye and when the position the black woman occupies is seen as enviable. There are too many examples to list here, enough examples to fill a dissertation, but all one has to do is look at any of the coverage of Michelle Obama during her time in the White House or, more specifically if you'd like, the many op-eds that were written about Beyoncé after her most recent pregnancy announcement. I wonder what it takes to put fingers to keyboard and write something dripping with that level of irrationality and hate. But then I know the answer to that question as well.

"Words mean things," I say to myself at times while making my way through essays or news stories or the quagmire of Twitter. I'm not only speaking of definitions, although there are some who choose to ignore even that basic foundation. I'm also speaking of the text within the text. Words don't only mean things. They mean things. They have been dragged through history's muck. They are stained by it, especially when used to describe certain groups. Especially when coming out of the mouth or the pen of the powerful few.

I am not innocent here. As I’ve gotten older and, one hopes, wiser, I try to think about why I feel the urge to use certain words to describe certain people and things. But I don’t catch everything. There are times when I put my foot firmly in my mouth. In those moments, I feel shame, disgust, and remorse. These are hard feelings to allow to sit inside you. They are hard feelings to allow to do their important work. It is easier to violently push them away or ignore them. It is easier to lash out at the person who has taken up the sometimes painful task of calling you on it. It is easier to apologize without ever actually saying that you are sorry.

What would a true admission of guilt mean? That you are fallible? That you are susceptible to intellectual frailty? That you occasionally let society and the legacy of our world’s tortured history infect your thoughts? If that is what it would mean, then I welcome you to being alive and awake in 2018.

I expected there to be both positive and negative critiques of the dress. I would expect nothing less of my fellow fashion watchers, and yet my stomach was in knots even before the "messy bun" statements sent me flying into a rage. A couple of days prior while looking at pictures of Meghan arriving in Windsor, a thought popped into my head unwanted and unbidden. “I hope she wears her hair down for the wedding so I don’t have to hear anyone’s nasty complaints about it.” I berated myself for retreating to the box I subjected my younger self to in an effort to dodge scrutiny and criticism when in predominately white spaces. It is a habit that I've mostly grown out of at this point but there are moments when I backslide.

I was tired. I am tired. Physically obviously but also mentally and emotionally. A year or two ago I would have been able to brush it off. Brushing it off has always been part of surviving. Why should I care about the statements of people who aren't even aware of the shit that they have internalized? Who has time for those who want to live an unexamined life for fear of the work that living the opposite would entail? And yet here I am more sensitive ever.

Sensitive and in the right.

Thankfully the sometimes cowardly ways of a woman watching from nearly 6,000 miles away had absolutely no effect on the styling decisions that were made for that perfectly sunny day. She wore her hair up all the better to complement the neckline of the dress that Clare Waight Keller had created for her. And when her future husband lifted her veil all I saw was a face beaming happiness.

In the hours following the wedding while still too tired to sleep, I read a couple of pieces about The Dress. Both reached the same conclusion about what was being said with her choice.

It was not a Cinderella choice, not one that spoke of fantasy or old-fashioned fairy tales, but one that placed the woman proudly front and center. It underscored Ms. Markle’s own independence by divesting her of frippery, while also respecting tradition and keeping her covered up. It celebrated female strength in the rigorous nature of its line — six exactingly placed seams — the substance of its fabric (double-bonded silk cady), and the choice of designer: a British woman who, as a statement from Kensington Palace read, had “served as the creative head of three globally influential fashion houses — Pringle of Scotland, Chloé, and now Givenchy.”

The dress, designed by Clare Waight Keller, was free of extravagant embellishments. It was not covered in yards of delicate lace. It did not have a single ruffle — no pearls or crystals. Its beauty was in its architectural lines and its confident restraint. It was a romantic dress, but one that suggested a clear-eyed understanding that a real-life romance is not the stuff of fairy tales. The dress was a backdrop; it was in service to the woman. The woman. That’s what the dress emphasized. Not bridal whimsy. Not princess tropes. Not royal pomp. The former actress, the former blogger, the formerly single lady, now has the title Duchess of Sussex. But she is still Meghan.

It's a conclusion that I also came to and one that I believe extends to her hair and makeup.

I stayed away from pieces about those items. I still had walls to maintain after all even if they were doing their job poorly. And I still had things to enjoy in spite of it all.

Friday, March 23, 2018

I returned to my mother's house in the late spring of 2005 with a trunk filled with linens, books that I couldn't bear to resell, a stack of fashion magazines, a diploma, and a Coach bag. At least it had been sold to me as a Coach bag when I had foolishly overdrawn my account when buying it on eBay a few weeks prior to graduation. I had spent ages closely examining the shape of its iconic C's in the images posted by the seller. The colorful pieces of suede resembled waves and were assembled much as they had been when Summer Roberts carried the same bag in a different colorway on an episode of The O.C. The one that would soon be mine featured fabric strips full of those C's I craved in addition to the suede and leather. But when it arrived, it became obvious that it was not the real deal. It was the small things, like the uneven stitching along the edges of its straps, that revealed the truth to me. I knew others wouldn't nitpick it in the same way, would think its various shades of pink lovely, and would never question its authenticity. But I never carried it, could never bring myself to carry it. Instead I stuffed it with the bank statement outlining my folly and hid it in a closet.

I already owned a Coach bag, a simple, slouchy hobo in brown suede that had been a Christmas surprise after a first semester of pretty good grades during my freshman year of college. For reasons that could fill a novella, the pretty good grades were not long for this world. That hobo, however, went out with me last month as I drank wine while in the midst of a cliché fit of Valentine's Day melancholy. Those iconic C's live on the lining and nowhere else. On its surface with patches worn smooth with age and much use, the bag proclaims itself as coming from nowhere and belonging to no one. I've come to love that mystery, but at 22 and in the midst of reacquainting myself with my childhood love of fashion, I craved something that did the opposite.

And so I forgot about the logos for a time. It was easy enough to do. I am in the midst a years-long journey of stripping my wardrobe bare of colors and prints and other things that might, at a cursory glance, stamp it as of a particular time. But I should have known better than to ignore them. This has been a decade of retreads to the point of worry, a circling of the same half-century for inspiration. In ten or twenty years will there be any way to know that an item of clothing is from the 2010s? There will be other context clues, hair and makeup and atmosphere, but the distance between a 2016 bodysuit and a 1993 bodysuit is small.

Why we returned to the 1970s or 1980s or 1990s at any particular point in the past eight years is a mystery that I generally don't try to solve. Mostly I sigh and think here come the strong shoulders again and again and again. Even as the extreme low rises and track suits of my college years reemerged, I thought little of the why and mostly of how fast time gets away from you. But I can't get this new wave of logomania out of my head. The Fall/Winter 2018 collections did nothing to help matters. The distaste among those sitting at the top of the fashion hierarchy seemed so strong for so long that I honestly thought the logos would never return, at least not to the ready-to-wear stage.

We've lived through a decade of dire retail news. "Apocalypse" has been thrown around a lot recently. Various strategies flung at walls to see what sticks. An increased focus on one's menswear arm. Transformation into a lifestyle brand. See Now, Buy Now. Chicken sans head is the perpetual mood. As the turmoil and angst continued even after the economy as a whole began to recover, logos were an easy target. They played the sad opposition in writing about the rise of the minimal squad. Easier to blame logos than some unwieldy shift in when we shop and where we shop and how much we shop. Yet the deeper I got into the Pre-Fall 2018 collections, the brighter the light shining off of the logos became. As that season wrapped up and everyone began preparing for the runways of New York, I received an email from Gap announcing their logo remix collection promoted by a group of bright young things.

So let's start at the beginning as it seems only right that I go back and examine in order the points at which I closed my eyes. Scott was named the creative director of Moschino in the fall of 2013. (Somehow I'd forgotten that it happened that long ago. Anyone staying put for more than three years feels like a rarity nowadays, an achievement to be lauded.) The Moschino name is everywhere in Scott's work. Here it was that first season irreverently twisted and folded into a form reminiscent of McDonald's golden arches. And then there it was stamped on prescription pills and their accompanying bottles. His work immediately became the stuff of a fashion influencer's dreams as well as catnip for street style photographers. It was an aggressive wink at our consumer culture, and, therefore, you could almost convince yourself that these weren't the same as the logos of yore. They were fun! They were joking! Just don't look at them too hard or too long.

Gvalasia wasn't known for his brand's eponymous work, at least not at first. People weren't walking the streets in sweaters and tees stamped with Vetements. Instead DHL and its easily recognizable shades of yellow and red lived on tees costing hundreds of dollars. One might put this work in the same class as Scott and his golden Moschino arches but there was something more sly happening here, something that made my skin crawl. Could I put my finger on it? Not really. It would be odd to express a discomfort with late stage capitalism on a blog where I so often write of luxury but I think that might have been what it was. And so when Gvalasia landed at Balenciaga, my hackles went up. He wasn't really to blame for my apathy laced with distaste. I could deal with Vetements as an entity that had sway over the way that the fashion world was moving, but his appointment at Balenciaga, a brand that had been pivotal in my mid-late 2000s fashion reeducation, left me with a sinking, queasy feeling. Once there, he went the route Scott had taken at Moschino, albeit with a more serious tone, and I recoiled. I turned away from 2016 election throwbacks. I broke my pact with myself to merely subtweet those designers and brands that I did not care for. And at times, I stopped paying attention altogether.

And that brings us to Michele. Everything leads back to Michele nowadays, doesn't it? I'm still waiting for the inevitable bursting of that bubble, and in that in-between space, I forgot that everyone would need to fall in line in every possible way before the cracks would truly begin to appear. I forgot that I still needed to pay very close attention.

He has been doing the most traditional logo work of the trio. This was the interlocking G's as central talking point. This was the classic red, blue, and green stripes in fur coat form. This was Gucci front and center again and again. It was the old way. Yes, it was infused with his eccentric, sometimes chaotic, style profile (Guccify Yourself!), but it was still the old way. It was what I thought we were to leave buried in the past. This new yet old direction wasn't without controversy. Michele liked playing with the idea of fakes, sending pieces marked with Guccy down his runway, and ran into a wave of criticism when he took "inspiration" from the work of Dapper Dan, a king in that space. He mostly fended off that controversy by having Gucci team up with the man himself. This particular bit of the tale all makes sense if one thinks about it for a moment for in Michele's work there is an air of unconcern about the very thing that helped bring down the logo in the first place.

Early last month, I decided that it was time for the Everlane tote I used as my work bag to be retired. It had endured many bus rides, a vinaigrette incident, and an encounter with a shitting pigeon near the corner of 5th and Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. But when I accidentally knocked iced coffee off of my desk and onto it, I knew it was the end. That day I took to Twitter asking which of three similarly anonymous options I should replace it with. I knew the answer already. I often do when asking such questions but I'm always curious to see if someone will change my mind. If they will expose me to some fact that I am missing. In the end, I went with the same bag with a coated base in black to better protect it from commute grime and my penchant for spilling. But that first gray Everlane hadn't always been my work go-to.

When I moved across the country four springs ago, I brought a red, quilted Coach tote with me. Much like the brown suede hobo, it had been a Christmas present from my mother. Not that I had done anything in the preceding six years of my life to earn it or deserve it. I think for my mother those college years represent the best version of Samantha, which is why she still sometimes defaults to Coach bag as gift. I never carried it in Boston. I couldn't imagine stuffing it into the small locker that I shared at my part-time retail job or bringing it along with me to the $6 movie matinees that I frequented. But in Los Angeles, in a new life, I thought it might have a place. I was drawn to its candy apple color and finish, but that finish would be its downfall. Five days a week on my shoulder or in my hand was too much for its straps, and they began to crack. It went back to my mother and then back to Coach but there was nothing to be done. I put it, still in the box in which it was mailed back to me, on the shelf in my closet next to an old comforter.

My new gray tote with its black base arrived soon after my informal Twitter poll, but there was something different about it. Pinned to one corner was an enamel pin, white with a black trim and inside its rectangular shape in black and raised was one word, EVERLANE. I unpinned it from the bag and looked it over before leaving it on the wooden ledge of a large mirror in my bedroom next to earrings and nail polishes and lipsticks.